Build the Best Gaming PC for Any Budget

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Did you find an extra $100 between the living room couch cushions? Excellent. We’re going to make two changes to the above configuration. Both will show how some extra cash can go a long way towards improving performance. (Changed parts are in bold.)

Shopping List

Component

Model

Price

CPU

AMD Athlon II X3 440

$75

Video Card

Gigabyte Radeon HD 5770 1GB

$150

Motherboard

Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2

$50

Memory

OCZ Platinum 4GB DDR2/1066

$90

Hard Drive

Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB

$48

Optical Drive

Lite-On iHAS424 DVD burner

$23

Case/Power Supply

Rosewill TU-155 II 500

$70

Operating System

Windows 7 Home Premium

$99

Total

$605

AnalysisAt lower price points like these, our top priority was to improve frame rates. That was clearly the weak spot of the first build. For this task, the Radeon HD 5770 is king. There are many good HD 5770 cards out there; we chose Gigabyte’s overclocked GV-R577SO-1GD, which was on sale and offered a small extra boost in performance.

As you can see from the new benchmark results, this configuration offered a significant jump in frame rates. Note that I’ve seen this card vacillate between $150 and $170; if the price goes up, Sapphire and XFX both make good versions of the HD 5770, albeit without the slight overclocking, for similar cash.

Meanwhile, the bump to 4GB of RAM in a dual-channel configuration didn’t really show up in the benchmark results. But it offers an obvious benefit when running multiple programs simultaneously, and generally made the PC feel snappier in day-to-day operation. In short, this is a solid budget system that we’d be proud to game on.